Read this extraordinary paragraph, appropriately enough, on the train into work today:

"It was now full winter, and barbarous how raw; so going around the city on the spidery cars, rides lasting hours, made you stupid as a stoveside cat because of the closeness inside; and htere was something fuddling besides in the mass piled up of uniform things, the likeness of small parts, the type of newspaper columns and the bricks of buildings. To sit and be trundled, why you see: there's a danger in that of being a bobbin for an endless thread or bolt for yard goods; if there's not much purpose anyway in the ride. And if there's some amount of sun in the dusty weep marks of the window, it can be even worse for the brain than those iron-deep clouds just plain brutal and not mitigated. There haven't been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens."

- The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

(For comparison, try this great article about commuting from the New Yorker.)

In all the coverage of Iceland's banking crisis, I haven't seen anyone mention that Iceland has won more gold medals (9) than any other country in the annual World's Strongest Man competition. Perhaps they can get their economy back on track by concentrating on the export of tremendously muscular fisherman.

Incidentally, here is an amazing song by the Pudzian Band, the band founded by current World's Strongest Man Mariusz Pudzianowski. It's a lot more eurotechno than you'd expect.

Two observations on Home Land by Sam Lipsyte:

1. You're a young male American novelist and you've written a book about someone who's bored of his life - it's conversational, flippant, obsessed with its own contemporaneity - people will like it because it's theoretically a worthwhile literary novel and yet it takes absolutely no mental effort to read or understand. But you've left no place for actual human feeling. So you crowbar in a dead or dying mother. This happens in Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, Home Land by Sam Lipsyte, and doubtless many others I've forgotten. Enough! It's so fake!

(Admittedly, I did enjoy all three of those books quite a lot.)

2. The front cover of my paperback edition (above) has the following quote:

'You'll love it' Lad's Mag

No one at HarperPerennial noticed there was still uncorrected dummy text on the front cover?

A couple of very Ballardian passages from The Moviegoer, which came out eight years before The Atrocity Exhibition:

After a car crash:

The traffic has slowed, to feast their eyes on us. A Negro sprinkling a steep lawn under a summer house puts his hose down altogether and stands gaping. By virtue of our misfortune we have become a thing to look at and witnesses gaze at us with heavy-lidded almost seductive expressions. But almost at once they are past and those who follow see nothing untoward. The Negro picks up his hose. We are restored to the anonymity of our little car-space.

A married couple who have written a sex manual:

It is impossible not to imagine them at their researches, as solemn as a pair of brontosauruses, their heavy old freckled limbs twined about each other, hands probing skillfully for sensitive zones, pigmented areolas, out-of-the-way mucous glands, dormant vascular nexuses.

And a bit that made me laugh:

As for Sharon: she finds nothing amiss in sitting in the little bucket seat with her knees doubled up in the sunshine, dress tucked under. An amber droplet of Coca-Cola meanders along her thigh, touches a blond hair, distributes itself around the tiny fossa.

"Aaauugh," I groan aloud.

"What's the matter?"

"It is a stitch in the side." It is a sword in the heart.

Point Counterpoint

"All the friendly and likeable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive." - Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, 1961

"Haters are scandalous." - Nas, "Breathe", 2008

I love this artist Nina Murdoch who has just won the Threadneedle Figurative Art Prize.

For several months I've been obsessed by this sentence from an interview with Philip Roth:

"... it feels to me very much like a dying moment, for literary culture in my own country – but you can't have computers and iPods and BlackBerries and blueberries and raspberries, and have time left to sit for two or three hours with a book."

Two or three hours! Then today, provoked by that sentence into reading Roth himself (The Ghost Writer) over dinner instead of watching Mad Men as usual, I see this:

"He did not do justice to a writer unless he read him on consecutive days and for no less than three hours at a sitting. Otherwise, despite his notetaking and underlining, he lost touch with a book's inner life and might as well not have begun. Sometimes, when he unavoidably had to miss a day, he would go back and begin all over again, rather than be nagged by his sense that he was wronging a serious author."

Oh god!

Here is a table that appears in Reactionary Modernism by Jeffrey Herf, derived from the pre-WW2 writings of the German economist Werner Sombart. Let's imagine it's a quiz from a magazine.

A	B
Exchange value	Use value
Gold	Blood
Circulation	Production
Abstraction	Concrete immediacy
Reason	Instinct
Desert	Forest
Intellect	Soul
Zivilsation	Kultur
Merchant	Entrepreneur
International socialism and international capitalism	National socialism

Mostly A's: You are the Jewish Geist.
Mostly B's: You are German technology.

Although I'm half-Jewish, I think I prefer forest to desert and use value to exchange value. But, on the other hand, I do prefer abstraction to concrete immediacy, reason to instinct, intellect to soul, and - perhaps decisively - international socialism to National Socialism.

You certainly don't get much sense from Werner Sombart's Wikipedia page that he was in fact a fairly committed anti-Semite who even disliked department stores because he thought their "crass juxtapositions" were a product of Jewish sensibilities.

Adorno on dissonance

‘... the opinion that Beethoven is comprehensible and Schoenberg incomprehensible is an objective illusion. Whereas in new music the surface alienates a public that is cut off from the production, its most distinctive phenomena arise from just those social and anthropological conditions that are those of its listeners. The dissonances that frighten them speak of their own situation; for this reason only are those dissonances intolerable to them.’

‘The ascendancy of dissonance seems to destroy the rational, “logical” connections within tonality, the simple triadic relations. Yet dissonance is more rational than consonance insofar as it articulate the relationship of sounds, however complex, contained in it instead of buying their unity at the price of the annihilation of the partial elements contained in it, that is, through a “homogenous” resistance.’

- from Philosophy of New Music

‘Dissonance is the truth about harmony.’

- from Aesthetic Theory

Some interesting quotations from Exquisite Corpse by Michael Sorkin:

p.3: "The biggest baby chucked out with the functionalist bathwater, however, was the prospect of an inventive urbanism. The very idea of city planning had been made disreputable by post-war experience and its two spectactularly failed mdoels: urban renewal and the suburbs. Physical planning is still flinching from the disrepute of this love-enslavement to social engineering, and had been almost entirely abandoned as a municipal function in the United States; the public realm reduced to reacting to the shoves and slaps of the invisible hand."

p.53: "The central dilemma of the Los Angelist is that his or her faith dictates the city's ultimate mysteriousness, yet his or her duty is to explain. As successive efforts skirt piecemeal around mist-shrouded essences, faith in the possibility of a (probably unknowable) unified field theory spurs the effort. The catalogue expands, the taxonomy branches. Los Angeles is a hermeneutist's heaven: everybody expects an answer. The deity here is Quincy (Jack Klugman's, that is, not Quatremere). All this activity tends to produce inconclusive ways of speaking rather than ways of knowing. Los Angeles has a rhetoric but no epistemology."

p.61 "The banality of the times is nowhere starker than it what passes for a critical tradition in the mass media. Here, by and large, critics tend to stand in the same relation to their subjects as advertisers do to their products. This has to do not simply with puffery but with the use of a limited lexicon of valuation, of a cluster of categories that by their very incantatino assure legitimation of a subject."

"Revelling in his status as the first Italian statesman to play a key role in international affairs, Mussolini fed the press twice daily with news of his activities, including the information on one occasion that he could not be disturbed as he was in bed with a girl."

- from Hurrah for the Blackshirts by Martin Pugh

"It was typical of [Filippo Tommaso] Marinetti’s warm-hearted generosity that he should have lent Severini the money on which to get married; and yet it was equally typical that, when the young couple arrived back in Milan, the speeches against marriage at the party held by the Futurists to celebrate their return were so violent that, according to Soffici, the bride, who was only sixteen, burst into tears."

- from Three Intellectuals in Politics by James Joll

"... for we are all accustomed to believe that maps and reality are necessarily related, or that if they are not, we can make them so by altering reality."

- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

In Tibet:

"Yak-hair tents provide shelter and food; yak hair clothes the poor; yak-hair ropes tie yak-hair bags onto yaks; yak bones make glue; yak shoulder blades are used as surfaces on which to write prayers; yak horns make snuff boxes or whisky flasks; yak skin is used to make thongs, thimbles, snow goggles, sacks and slings; yak tails decorate horses; a yak's glands are used to cure many different kinds of ailment. Boiled and roasted yak steaks are usually washed down with yak butter tea; hardered yak cheese and dried yak provided sustenance on the road."

from Himmler's Crusade by Christopher Yale